In a house somewhere, someone is getting fucked.
A love story is beginning and ending itself,
Good Days by SZA plays airily
from a phone tipped into a bowl
not so close to its listeners.
Their thoughts are elsewhere,
sensations muffled by bodies abstracting away.
Failure to actualize, failure to communicate,
All the tension is drawn from decouplings,
Pulling outs.
The story will be titled “All the group sex I wasn’t invited to”
and it will read just like you’d expect, except
far more beautifully, but it wont be about group sex.
It will be about me, because I find it incredibly hard
to imagine the interiority of someone else.
Instead I will imagine a winner,
a loser, grasping churning writhing peoples;
lovingly dirty, whose wants might be met, will be subverted;
one will beg to become the wilted petals of a bouquet
forgotten on a motel chair, and the other
will be gone by the time they ask.
This is one of my favorite stories,
hypothetical me will say to the hypothetical
someone across the table from me.
Someone drinking an expensive cocktail on my tab,
a someone who feels lofty about all the wrong words,
a someone I think I might not like but who will still be
above, below, inside of, or on me.
I want to seem well read,
want someone to think of how interesting I am
as they explore me, vacantly lusting
for a spot, button, trauma they cannot name.
Shivering frenulum to quivering taint. I hope
someone will press deep enough to leave
a finger sized mark on my identity. Draw
question marks with tooth or nail
down my exposed throat, across my abdomen,
that ask me if it’s okay, to be boy on his back,
okay to be less certain by the moment
if I am worth the body I was given.
I will look at those marks later in the mirror
and not be able to recall the physical sensation,
not remember their hair, or
the way the flowers they brought me smelled.
Not the way I looked after fucking
how I thought I wanted to fuck,
I’ll just know how good it felt
to get in the car afterwards
and leave.